Using the Blockly visual programming editor to call a .NET Core WebAPI

I like to showcase interesting and cool open source projects that need more attention! Go give our friend a star on GitHub! NetCoreBlockly on GitHub is clever and fun!

Blockly is a JavaScript library for building visual programming editors. If you've used languages like Scratch you've seen block-style programming environments. The picture below shows you a demo of calling a .NET Core WebAPI using Blockly code!

Remember that once you have a WebAPI you can make it available in a number of ways. The "projection" of the methods that the WebAPI makes available can be presented visually, as Swagger/OData/GraphQL, however you like. Another project is WebAPI2CLI that lets you call WebAPI endpoints easily from a CLI (Command Line Interface) that is more high fidelity than curl or wget.

What .NET Core Blockly is doing is looking at the projection/interface of your WebAPI and generating Blockly blocks! That means that anyone (business users, student, tester, whatever) could try out your WebAPI with a simple drag and drop interface in their browser!

You can pull in Swagger, OData, or GraphQL interfaces.

• NETCore2Blockly generates Blockly blocks for each of your controller actions.
• Demo at https://netcoreblockly.herokuapp.com/ ( play with the links from the bottom)
• Demo Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GptkNWjmCzk
• Sample Project is TestBlocklyHtml from this repository

I love seeing fun projects like this that make the web (and .NET code) easier to use! Go give them some stars and get involved!

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